Phoenix is the Autonomous Commerce Platform for DTC Founders. We unify storefronts, checkout, payments, and operations into one platform where AI agents handle the operational grind and merchants focus on growth.
We set out to build the "Shopify of Direct Response" and along the way recognized something bigger. Direct response is roughly a third of all ecommerce transactions, a trillion-dollar market chronically overlooked by Silicon Valley. The merchants who run it are obsessive about tooling.
They live and die by velocity, conversion, and margin. They have no brand moats. They only compete on operations, which is exactly what makes them ripe for agentic disruption and the earliest, fastest adopters of AI agents in commerce.
That insight reframed Phoenix from "the Shopify of DR" to the AI Agent Platform for DTC Founders.
This is a category-defining bet, and we are running at it from a position of strength.
Where We Are Today
8-figure ARR growing 100%+ YoY
Strong unit economics and efficient growth
Rapid merchant adoption and expanding market presence
Backed by experienced operators and investors with a history of building and scaling successful businesses
Why Now
Product-market fit is established. Demand continues to grow, merchant adoption is accelerating, and Phoenix is outperforming expectations.
There is an opportunity to define a category. While many companies are building AI tools for commerce, few are focused on helping sophisticated DTC operators automate revenue-generating decisions at scale.
Our customers are AI-ready. They adopt technology quickly when it drives measurable business outcomes, creating an ideal environment for agentic products.
This is a rare opportunity for a technical leader to step into a company with proven revenue, product-market fit, an established team, and a large market opportunity.
Three things make this an inflection point:
Why This Role Exists
We found the third of ecommerce that Silicon Valley forgot, and by the end of this year we
expect to have out-shipped the legacy players who has coasted on this market for a decade. We
move fast. Our engineering team is strong and getting stronger. Our merchants adopt what we
build because it makes them more money.
The product surface for next year is set: storefronts, checkout, payments, the merchant OS (our
CRM), and the Phoenix AI agent. It will evolve, and when it does, the change has to come from
a smart place: deep understanding of our merchants, the market, our competitors, and what our
team can actually build. Not from a whiteboard.
At this stage the job is a grind by design: living in the CRM daily, testing the AI agent the way a
merchant would, answering an engineer's question about moving subscriptions from one gateway
to another within the hour, knowing our top 25 merchants' funnels cold. It is also a seat at the
table. Our founder and CEO wants a product leader who can sit across from him and discuss
where the 12-18 months go, with the credibility that comes from knowing the product, the
merchants, and the market better than anyone else in the room.
Staying close to the realities on the ground is not a stage we are passing through. It is how our
entire leadership team operates today, and it is how we intend to operate for the rest of this
company's history. We are allergic to ivory towers.
We have strong principal-level PMs and engineers with deep domain expertise. What we are
missing is the product leader who sets the bar for them every day, sees the bug before the
merchant reports it, turns "shipped" into & "adopted and moving the number," and brings that
ground truth into the bets we make.
This is not a "set the vision and delegate" role. We are hiring a VP of Product who:
● knows our product, our competitors, and our merchants inside and out
● runs the roadmap as a living set of bets, not a document. Every item has an ROI case, a
reason it sits where it sits, and a trade-off the team understands
● gives tactical, in-depth feedback on every spec, prototype, and PR that matters
● holds the bar for PMs and engineers, as a drill sergeant when needed
● owns the scoreboard against our competitors and moves it
● is a real thinking partner to the CEO on where Phoenix places its next bets
What You'll Own
The product: Storefronts, checkout, payments, the merchant OS, and the AI agent. Roadmap,
sequencing, specs, quality, and rollout. And a much higher bar for the word "shipped". A feature
flag is not shipped. An announcement is not shipped. Live in production on the date we promised
is not shipped either. Shipped means merchants found it, adopted it, and would be annoyed if we
took it away. It means the execution was elegant, the business problem it was built for is gone,
and we can draw a straight line from it to Phoenix making more money or a merchant growing
faster. Anything short of that is still in progress, and you are the person who refuses to call it
done.
The scoreboard: Objectively measurable superiority against our direct competitors. Revenue
per visitor, checkout conversion, page speed, approval rate, activation, retention, and user
experience, benchmarked consistently. You have accounts on every competitor's product and you
actually use them, so you know exactly where we are better and where we are not. A/B tests with
real sample sizes, and the honesty to know when we are winning versus when merchant behavior
is flattering us.
The PM team: Lead and raise a small team of principal-level product managers. Set the standard
for what a Phoenix PM ships: PRDs with prototypes, specs with test cases, launches with
reference merchants and KPIs. Coach fast, decide fast.
Merchant truth: Direct relationships with our top merchants. You sit in their channels, you are
on calls weekly, you know their funnels and their complaints from memory, and repeat pain
points become shipped fixes in weeks, not quarters. Merchants want to talk to you because you
know their pain points and our product cold. They leave the conversation better at running their
business, and you leave it knowing more about what we should build next.
The AI-native product: Make the Phoenix agent something merchants rely on for production-
grade decisions on real revenue, not a demo. You test it the way a merchant would, you define
what "good" means, and you hold the line on quality.
The delivery machine: Partner with the CTO and the engineering leads so product and
engineering move as one motion. Specs before delivery, every card with a date, slips visible
before anyone asks, and a sniff for wasted engineering hours. You kill work that doesn't earn its
place.
Competitive intelligence: Know every competitor's product, pricing, and roadmap better than
they do. When a competitor or a major platform ships something material, our response memo
exists within 48 hours.
Who You Are
company, you have owned a product surface where conversion, latency, and reliability
carried direct economic consequences, and you stepped up in scope rather than back.
● A missile, not a passenger. You are an entrepreneur at heart who operates with a lot of
autonomy and solves problems instead of escalating them. You don't bring us problems;
you bring solutions and the resources you need to execute.
● You have taken a product from behind a competitor to ahead on a measurable metric, and
you can show the before and after.
● In the weeds by choice. You use the product every day, you would rather test a flow
yourself than read a report about it, and you see the bug before the customer reports it. A
product leader who "stays above the details" makes you uncomfortable.
● Technical enough to be dangerous. You read PRs, you can follow a gateway migration or
understand why a cron job is locking a table, and you hold your own in an architecture
conversation. You are a power user of modern AI tools, you prototype before you spec,
and you have shipped AI into production with real opinions on determinism, evaluations,
and building reliably on non-deterministic layers.
● You have built for customers whose revenue depends on your product. Fintech,
payments, commerce, or another domain where your conversion, reliability, and speed
show up directly in your customer's P&L, so you already know what it costs when the
product is down and the customer finds out first.
● A drill sergeant with no ego. You give very tactical, in-depth feedback on the work PMs
and engineers are actually doing. You hold the bar, address underperformance early, tell
people directly, and admit your own mistakes fast.
● Execution and strategy, not one or the other. You ship every week and kill work that
doesn't matter, and you can hold your own in a three-year strategy debate because your
opinions come from the ground. You also do the unglamorous parts: rollout plans, launch
education, incident reviews, the requirements doc nobody wants to write.
● Startup-forged. You have thrived in fast, resource-constrained, high-intensity
environments in the last 5 years.
● No tolerance for mediocrity. The individuals that thrive here hold themselves and others
to an extremely high standard with no exceptions. We're here to build a generational company.
Huge Plus
● Ecommerce, direct response, or high-risk payments experience. You have built checkout,
subscription billing, or payments products for merchants, or you have worked inside a
company in our competitive set.
● You have run a DTC or direct response store yourself and know what a broken checkout
feels like on a Friday night.
● You still write code, or you build working prototypes with AI tools instead of slide decks.
● You have shipped an AI agent or LLM-powered feature that customers rely on in
production.
● You have founded a company, or been an early operator who owned the outcome.
Leadership Traits We Value
High ownership
Decisiveness
Strong recruiting and talent development capabilities
Accountability
Product judgment
Calm under pressure
Builder mentality
Culture
All In to Win — Operate with urgency, intensity, and a relentless bar for excellence.
A Players Only — Only hire, develop, and keep A players. Protect talent density.
Merchant First — Merchants are why we exist. Every decision measured by merchant impact.
Entrepreneurial Spirit — Move like a Day One company. Fast, scrappy, hungry. Everyone owns.
Execution Over Ego — Best ideas win regardless of source. Status and titles do not matter.
These are the values that guide how we operate:
Skills Required
- Experience as the number one or number two product leader at a growth-stage company
- Owned a product surface where conversion, latency, and reliability had direct economic consequences
- Demonstrated ability to improve a measurable product metric and show before-and-after results
- Hands-on product orientation, including frequent product usage, flow testing, and identifying defects
- Technical fluency sufficient to read pull requests, understand gateway migrations and database locking, and participate in architecture discussions
- Experience shipping AI-enabled products into production, with understanding of determinism, evaluations, and reliability on nondeterministic systems
- Experience building products for customers whose revenue depends directly on product conversion, reliability, and speed
- Experience leading and developing high-performing product managers
- Ability to balance hands-on execution with long-term product strategy
- Experience working in fast-paced, resource-constrained, high-intensity startup environments within the last five years
- Strong ownership, decisiveness, accountability, product judgment, recruiting ability, and talent development skills
- Ecommerce, direct response, or high-risk payments experience
- Experience building checkout, subscription billing, or payments products for merchants
- Experience working at a company in the competitive set
- Personal experience operating a DTC or direct-response store
- Ability to write code or build functional prototypes with AI tools
- Experience shipping an AI agent or LLM-powered feature used by customers in production
- Founded a company or served as an early operator with outcome ownership
What We Do
Phoenix Ecommerce Technologies provides an autonomous commerce platform for direct-to-consumer merchants. Its software combines wallet-native and customizable checkout, no-code conversion funnels, payment tokenization and intelligent transaction routing, analytics, subscription billing, customer records, and automated retention/recovery workflows. The platform is designed for subscription brands and high-volume ecommerce businesses, helping them improve conversion, payment approvals, recurring revenue, and customer lifetime value through a unified operating system.
